Is Greatness Accidental?

By Tom Kando

I often think about what leads to a country’s greatness or to its failure, and two cases that everybody always talks about are contemporary America and ancient Rome - both in terms of success and failure. Here are a few thoughts about this:The greatness of ancient Rome and 20th century America can both be attributed to great leadership and to accident. Failure, in turn, is the result of stupidity.

I don’t want to call America’s success “accidental,” but I do, a little bit. Let me explain:

Some societies are planned, and some mostly happen. Many of the former are disasters, while the latter sometimes luck out and grow into phenomenal successes. The USSR was a “planned community.” It disintegrated in less than eighty years. So was the Third Reich. Meant to live for a thousand years, it lasted thirteen. The French planned their revolution and Napoleon’s policies, while the British approach was more laissez-faire, and we know which of the two countries did better.

America has its founding fathers, its Declaration of Independence, its Constitution. Of course, all countries are based on some minimum blueprint, without which no organized society can exist. This minimum requirement does not guarantee greatness, only survival. America’s greatness is the consequence of many additional factors, namely timing, demography, geography, coincidence. To wit: the country arose at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This huge continent was an empty receptacle ready to capture millions of excess population from Europe. It was fertile and rich in resources, with only a small hostile indigenous population - unlike the other areas of the world colonized by Europeans.

The rhetoric about America being the fulfillment of either a divine plan, or that of the genius of the founding fathers, is ex post facto. Looking back in the late 20th century, we attribute the country’s success to the way it was planned at the outset. But that was only a small part. To be sure, the founding fathers were a genial bunch, but enlightened and intelligent leadership is no guarantee of success. Periclean Athens is only one example of failure despite such leadership.

The Roman Empire was another success story, for the same reasons. There too, geography, demography and luck enabled a people to develop into a powerful civilization. Another historical accident. It finally failed because in time its leaders became corrupt imbeciles, believing in superstitions and murdering each other instead of facing their common external enemies.

Here are some conclusions:
1. Enlightened leadership is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a country’s success.
2. Geography, demography and luck are just as important.
3. Planning can lead to failure as well as to success. Remember Robert Burns’ famous words, “the best laid schemes of mice and men...”
4. The only thing we have to fear is stupidity itself. That is what the Romans succumbed to, in the end. leave comment here